Ability to group tags in dashboard reports

[dangrover]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I use tags for different projects within different workstreams with the format "workstream:project". For instance, personal vs work vs school. I like seeing the overall totals on the dashboard but I would like to group the breakdowns by these top level designations. I have 3-4 top level tags (which are the only ones that show up in the "tags" screen).

I'm happy to submit a pull request on this, but wanted to discuss it first to see if others have this problem or have ideas on which approach to take.

Describe the solution you'd like

The simplest solution would be this: On the edit panel for an entry, underneath the place where the user can enter tags to filter by, there could simply be a checkbox that says "Show top-level tags only". Alternatively, it could be a dropdown offering several levels. The option could also be hidden if the user does not use colons in their tags to create groups.

I can see this request is in some way duplicative of #140, but the usage of the tags system that is proposed there does not make sense to the usecase of wanting to have broad reports of categories of projects or areas of projects. While one could voluntarily make takes for different facets of an activity (i.e. perhaps an additional "area:school" or "area:family" tag), this is an additional hassle to have to remember to add an additional tag to every single entry and is redundant when the tag represents the project and it belongs to only one area.

Describe alternatives you've considered

A more complex solution might also involve an overhaul of tag management so that 1) the tags in a grouping can be seen, 2) tags could be archived (so they do not show up in dropdowns, etc). These are ancillary problems not related to the main one, though. If this is done, the edit panel for dashboards could then allow hierarchical selection of tags or tag groups.

Additional context

[jmattheis]

Hey thanks for the detailed request.

While one could voluntarily make takes for different facets of an activity (i.e. perhaps an additional "area:school" or "area:family" tag), this is an additional hassle to have to remember to add an additional tag to every single entry and is redundant when the tag represents the project and it belongs to only one area.

Could you explain what you mean with redundant with a concrete example? I feel like this use-case could be solved with a different tag structure without any tag info duplication.

[dangrover]

Sure! In my use of Traggo, I have tags for projects within different areas of my life. For my dayjob, I have meetings/admin time distinct from focused time. For school, I have each course with its own tag. I also have a catchall for personal initiatives/side projects with their own subtag. It is useful to see the breakdown individually (i.e. how much time spent on an individual course), or where the time in a given day went, but it is also useful to see the general breakdown within these larger categories to see how my overall balance of focus is shifting. This is what I wish to see in a longer-term graph of hours worked each week that I show on my dashboard, but right now it has 30 tags with different colors and is unintelligible.

With regards to using an alternative tag structure, the only solution I can think of would require making separate tags for the "area" and the project within the area. This would thus require having to manually remember to put two tags on every single entry, something that is pretty untenable and unmaintainable as a habit if you want to be able to quickly start/stop timers throughout your day. It also would be encoding redundant information: there is no reason, for instance, that I might tag time spent on a school course with the tag indicating that it is for my dayjob. Then there is a data integrity problem: if one wishes to use such a multi-tag scheme they must then have some means of checking that every entry complies. With a hierarchical scheme like mine, this problem doesn't exist.

I think fully embracing the notion of tag hierarchies would allow a lot more usecases than mine. Sometimes a tag should be hierarchical (contained inside another for reporting purposes), sometimes it indicates an orthogonal aspect of an activity that should be captured separately (i.e. shouldn't be hierarchical). I could see how people might want to tag "call" or "meeting" or something on its own, separate from another tag. But many usecases will also be better served by allowing users to have these hierarchical tags. You could then have reports with subtotals/categories, etc.

[jmattheis]

Thanks for your explanation. I still think that using a different tag structure should be the solution here as it's already supported and traggo was designed to be used that way. I'm open to changing my mind if multiple users want this feature.

[wenzai007]

I agree with @dangrover for this!! This is exactly what I also need after using it for a while, top level is the category, @jmattheis and you should provide the capability of grouping by top-level tag, Otherwise the grouping is too fine-grained and it lost the meaning of it. Your design is A:B where A should be a category, if you don't have the capability of summarize how long the catetory A consumes, it really is a bad thing.

[wenzai007]

@jmattheis @dangrover any updates for this feature?

[jmattheis]

No.